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Lads' mag ordered to give up bragging

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Zoo publisher Emap has scored a victory in the lads’ mag war with
IPC’s Nuts – securing a ban on its rival’s claim that Nuts is the
best-selling men’s magazine in Europe.

Emap put in a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about an email for Nuts headlined: “Wahey!

Nuts smashes the 300,000 barrier!”

It
went on to say: “Yep, as of this week, Nuts magazine, already the
bestselling men’s magazine in Europe, is officially bigger than ever.”

The
ASA this week judged that Emap’s claim – that it was impossible to
prove that Nuts was the best-selling men’s title in Europe – was true,
and told IPC not to repeat the statement.

According to the ASA,
staff at IPC defended themselves by saying “they had based their claim
on the total number of weekly copies of Nuts sold in a month”.

But
the watchdog added: “We considered that readers would understand the
claim ‘the biggest selling men’s magazine in Europe’ to mean that Nuts
sold more copies per issue than any other men’s magazine in Europe.

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“We
noted that the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) stated that, on
average, Nuts sold 304,751 copies per weekly issue and that FHM sold
560,167 copies per monthly issue.

“We considered that, because on
average FHM sold more copies per issue than Nuts, the claim ‘the
biggest selling men’s magazine in Europe’ was misleading.”